When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? 3.5 stars
Call it the Theater of Humiliation. Five likable characters — including a modern cowboy, a waitress who loves her mother, a handicapped gas station owner, a professional violinist and an intelligent importer — are degraded, abused, roughed up and demeaned by a vicious brute of a Vietnam vet for no reason other than his bad temper and their proximity.
This savage, entirely without redeeming qualities, says everything most civilized people are too generous even to think: He calls the handicapped man "Cripple," tells the overweight and unattractive waitress that no man will ever marry her, and shoots the unarmed importer simply to establish his dominance.
Then he makes the would-be movie cowboy skip to and fro like a child on a horsy, and threatens to smash the musician's $11,000 violin. And though there are a few isolated moments of bravado on the part of the victims, by and large no one puts up even a suspicion of a fight. Cruelty and vulgarity and psychosis have the upper hand. The most likely hero — the cowboy who wants to be called "Red Ryder" — just stands by mute and frightened, a washout physically and morally.
The play is Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, staged by Hat Trick Theatre in a stirring production at Ybor City's Silver Meteor Gallery, and featuring the splendid acting of Jack Holloway as the cruel madman with no respect for the commonest of decencies.
What does the play mean? Maybe it's a reply to all those glitzy westerns of yesteryear, of cowboys with soul and courage and charisma, standing for an America that was too pure ever to be defeated. Or maybe it's a commentary on the meaner, surlier country that America had become after several years in Vietnam (the play was first staged in 1973). Maybe it's about catharsis, in a way that Classical Greek drama once was for its audience: We see characters we identify with — Red and Angel and Richard and Clarice, not those strangers Agamemnon and Oedipus — and we see them fall from the heights of complacency to horror and degradation, and we feel pity and terror just the way Aristotle said we would.
But whatever the play's about, one thing's certain: This Hat Trick production is one of the most stimulating in recent memory, and should be viewed — even with its imperfections — by anyone who wants to believe that live theater can still startle. If for no other reason, see it for Holloway's performance, one of the best ever from one of the Bay area's most talented actors. The Silver Meteor is a bit hard to find? Find it anyway; make the effort. There's something in Red Ryder that deserves a large audience.
There's not much of a plot: Into a diner near the New Mexico desert come the characters I've already mentioned, some because they work there, some for a bit of refreshment before continuing the long drive to Wherever. After a while, Teddy and Cheryl join the group; their van needs a new generator, which they want service station owner Lyle to find for them. It soon becomes obvious that manic Teddy is off his meds. He sticks his nose into everyone's business, can't seem to stop talking, begins to menace everyone almost randomly. Things go from bad to worse; Teddy physically attacks Steven "Red" Ryder, verbally assaults everyone else and finally pulls a gun and shoots importer Richard.
Mocking and intimidating everyone around him, physically manhandling even women and the wounded, he makes us wonder: Where's the cavalry; where are the heroes on their white horses? When they don't seem to be coming, we begin to sense author Medoff's point.
Holloway as Teddy is spectacular. If you're lucky, you'll never meet anyone like him outside the theater. He's furious, barbarous, a physically intimidating lunatic. As Holloway rages and shouts orders up and down the length of the small Silver Meteor stage, it seems he might suddenly have a go at the audience too, at anyone stupid enough to enter his personal space.
Last year, Holloway deservedly won the Planet's Best Actor award, but in recent productions he hasn't seemed to be quite comfortable. That all changes in Red Ryder, where the thespian inhabits his role of dangerous criminal as if he were born for it.
There are other fine performances: As Red Ryder, Kevin Whalin looks the part of the cowboy hero, then shocks us by failing to stand up to the intruder. There's a tattoo on Ryder's arm that simply reads "Born Dead." At first it seems like a rebel boast, like the motto of a wise existential hero from Zane Grey by way of Kerouac. But after a time, after repeated failures to stand his ground, the tattoo seems to speak literally: This slick-haired would-be James Dean has no more vigor than does a corpse. Watching Holloway lift him up and turn him upside down is an affront to our Hollywood-fed systems. Where are Roy and Dale and Gene and Hopalong?
Two other performances are also top-notch. The very skillful April Bender plays Clarice, the violinist, with a demureness and self-restraint that finally gives way to rage when she comes to realize that her wounded husband can't protect her against vicious Teddy. And Aisha Duran, in the underwritten part of moll Cheryl, cleverly convinces us that she's part victim herself, that she wants to control Teddy, but can't, that she'll commit a crime if she has to, but would prefer not.
As waitress Angel, Soolaf Rasheid is not quite as satisfying, though — she's somewhat awkward in a performance that wants quiet, poignant grace. And Paul McColgan as handicapped Lyle seems a two-dimensional good guy; we miss the introspection, the complicated reflections on his incapacity. Still, Steve Fisher as Clarice's husband turns in creditable work: He's no physical match for Teddy, but has a reservoir of courage that he sometimes manages to draw upon.
Joe Winskye's fine direction insists on a maximum of menace from Teddy, and Jeff Boe's set, of a modern diner, is tolerably good if not outstanding. Cassandra Millhouse's costumes couldn't be better.
And you can't find a more provocative play than Red Ryder in the Bay area presently. See it and revise your dreams about that American icon, the cowboy; in Medoff's parable, he's a pouty loner who's rendered speechless — and powerless — by evil. Is there truth in this? Does recent American experience show it? Those are just some of the questions this rousing play will have you asking.
And they're questions that matter as much now as they did 30 years ago.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2006.
